Suburbs have experienced tremendous outward growth, yet many office jobs are still concentrated in urban areas. This forces many office workers to become long-distance commuters. In addition, many non-office workers spend their work hours traveling and commuting, often driving from appointment to appointment in a large suburban area. Take the example of the repair technician driving from appointment to appointment, often backtracking many times in the course of the day because the appointments are made at a central office, with no thought to tying appointments to location. With the rising price of gasoline this has become a critical consideration.
Employees are not the only ones who log several miles in the course of a day. Take the example of the stay-at-home mom driving her children from school to music lessons, to the dentist, and so on, while stopping to pick up groceries and the freshly-groomed family dog. Many stay-at-home moms log more miles per day than urban workers. Realtors must drive from property to property and this could encompass long distances.
The ability to sort and view calendars based on time is known, yet we do not have the ability to view or organize calendar events by location, even though location often dictates what events we can attend and when we can attend them. Most people intuitively organize their tasks by location, yet there is no known product to take advantage of this natural organizational modeling. Most of us are familiar with the concept of planning errands around a commute. Most people, when they know ahead of time that they will be driving from point A to point B, will organize tasks and make appointments around the locations between points A and B.
Referring to FIG. 1 there is shown an illustrative example of this intuitive location-based organizational planning. The example begins at home 120 with two planned events spanning a long distance: event 140—picking up a child at school at 3:00 p.m. and event 160—a 4:00 p.m. orthodontist appointment. The example ends upon returning home 120. The orthodontist 160 is distant from the school 140 and even further from the home 120. In order to maximize the driving time and gasoline consumption, the driver will automatically plan errands that coincide with the designated route from home 120 to school 140, from school 140 to the orthodontist 160, and then back home 120. FIG. 1 shows the driver has elected to make four additional stops, planned according to the original trip. The first stop 125 to return library books is between home 120 and school 140. The second stop 145 to pick up dry cleaning is between the school 140 and the orthodontist 160. Two additional stops, 175 to pick up Fido, and 185 to pick up dinner, are located between the orthodontist 160 and home 120. This is a basic example illustrating the natural way in which most people organize events around location. For most of us, this is an intuitive process.
There is a need for a method of organizing events around locations in order to overcome the shortcomings of the prior art.